


The Runaway Stray

by Mommy



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: chat is creepy and so is marinette, eventually the both of them are gonna have some WORDS., in which the rooftop is more welcoming and cozy than the bed at home, more character and relationships tags to be added as the work gets longer, post-glaciator because obviously
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-08
Updated: 2018-04-07
Packaged: 2019-04-01 09:49:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13995708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mommy/pseuds/Mommy
Summary: Since they found solace in one another on one particularly stressful night, Chat Noir has found Marinette a beacon of comfort and welcome, even through a glass door while she's asleep.





	The Runaway Stray

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chat Noir's day begins and ends with Marinette. There's even a little Marinette sprinkled throughout the rest of his life, making his day feel better, brighter, more worthwhile.  
> Not that he really notices.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was actually my first WIP fic here on AO3, but due to my negligence, it's only just now being posted (so I don't have to make a new draft page to keep it from being deleted from the archive soon).  
> If there's something you'd like to see or are excited about in this fic, or you see any inconsistencies or would like to propose new things, let me know!  
> I'm still v. v. new to the fandom and haven't written enough fanfiction to be confident with it, so I welcome discussions and proposals!  
> Like my other fic, A Little Idiosyncratic, this starts with Adrien extremely neutral towards Marinette and a little too in love with her alter-ego. If that's something you will definitely not enjoy, I warn you that this will be very slow-burn, especially because I lack a clear idea of where I'm going with this story. I have a general concept and objective, but that's about it!  
> Otherwise, this boy struggles with being socially inept for the time being - romanticizing friendship, being really bad at getting involved with people in social settings, focusing entirely on specific people while forgetting the rest, struggling with the duality of his closer relationships while knowing nothing about starting new ones, etc.  
> I guess one could call this a drabble that will eventually have more drabbles attached, and a possible chronology?

Chat Noir had finally gotten used to this setting greeting him when he pulled himself from the clutches of sleep: the bright sun was something he'd long been accustomed to, given that the north-facing wall of his bedroom was comprised entirely of window panels, but here, there was so much more open air. Here, he could hear the sounds of a thriving world with people in it. Here, he could make out the faint noise of a vibrating and chiming phone that signalled the start of the day.  
He'd indulge in the serenity of the morning as the ringtone persisted, slowly waking himself up.  
He would stretch and peek around the neighborhood from between the bars of the balcony railing and behold the sky above him, crisp blue eradicating the remaining vestiges of night without a cloud in sight.

Well, ordinarily. Today, the sky was still grey, muted by the darkness of early morning, still dissolving under scant traces of impending dawn, and there was no chiming to be heard.

Two things stayed completely the same, however:  
1) as the residential side of the Tom-Sabine Boulangerie-Patisserie's sound-proof walls were sabotaged by an open skylight - welcoming in all manners of bugs, rooftop strays, and, perhaps more intentionally, cool nighttime air - Chat Noir could overhear the chaos of Marinette Dupain-Cheng's morning routine starting, and  
2) while she scurried, clamored, and fell across the floor while seeming to argue with herself in a hush, she seemed to wake up just as exhausted as he was.

While it wasn't rare for Marinette to sleep through her alarm clock at least long enough for it to play at its loudest, unsnoozed, it was unusual that both Marinette _and_ Adrien had slept through it until it had silenced itself, renderring both impossibly late.  
This news, on any other day - maybe when he didn't feel as though he'd missed out on a couple more hours of sleep than he was used to - might've sent him immediately over her balcony railing and vaulting across the Parisian skyline to his house, just slow enough to concoct an excuse as to why he wasn't where he was _supposed_ to be at this time of day.

Instead, he still struggled to shake off sleep.  
An enormous, nearly-silent yawn shook his entire body, stretched his jaw, and brought tired tears to his eyes.  
He raked fingers through golden locks, ridding them of potting soil and miserably crumpled leaves, setting his back against the railing and listening in to the turmoil below.

A small, muffled shriek accompanied a sound barrier-shattering crash, followed by an apology, which Adrien could only imagine was directed to an inanimate object or whatever body part she'd injured.  
As she recuperated, he could pick up on the subtle sound of desperate, nervous chittering.  
In spite of her claim to tardiness, Chat couldn't bring himself to accept that the day had already begun without them.  
It felt as though he should still be asleep, and that went double for Marinette.

He looked around the rooftop in search of his baton so he could double-check the time, crawling around without heed to any noise he was making. It would be drowned out by Marinette's antics, anyway.  
Baton in-hand, he settled back against the railing, indulging in the serenity of the morning, where the cacophony of Marinette flitting about her room served as his rise-and-shine.

A gentle push of a claw into the paw pad in the center of the silver baton brought one half of it sliding down, exposing a screen.  
It was just shy of two hours before their first class, meaning Marinette surely had something unexpected this early in the morning.  
A delivery?  
Some family thing?  
For the life of him, he couldn't remember anything specific about Marinette's personal schedule or how it might be impacted by her obligations - not that he ever paid it any particular mind.  
What he could piece together was that, whatever Marinette was late for, wasn't something that impacted him.  
Outside of an unexpected early waking.  
Maybe he'd make an effort to know what she was doing in the mornings, if only to know what the day had in store for him.

There was a small, faint thunk, without any pained noises. In fact, all noise within Marinette's room had vanished.  
Marinette was up, gone with all probability that he would have another alarm to wake up to later, meaning he couldn't simply settle back down on the still-warm spot of her balcony where he'd been slumbering serenely for the past five hours, draped over a lifeless pot of soil, unless he really did want to be late.  
He was already awake, anyway.

Usually, Marinette being up and about meant it was time for him to am-scray; he had time today to linger and relish in the expiration of the morning tranquility and peer around the neighborhood another time.

Moving as it was at this hour, pedestrians were scant, and like they would be an hour from now, none of them paid enough mind to the sky in the morning to notice him.  
While Chat Noir existing on the rooftop could be dismissed as part of a patrol, it was sheer luck that the balcony was subtle and inconspicuous enough that few civilians who did see him on it might recognize that his morning patrol _originated_ there, or that almost all of his daytime patrols used it as a via point or destination, much less that he did so to visit anyone in particular.

Certainly not one of the small handful of civilians who had been closely tied with a great many of the akuma victims that regularly sent the city into a state of panic, one who had been recruited a number of times when Ladybug couldn't be found or was otherwise occupied, one who was the cause of one of the most recent akumatizations.  
Certainly not a civilian with whom Chat Noir had recently begun confiding in and spending an inordinate amount of time more than the rest of the population of Paris (with the exception of Ladybug, of course!).  
Certainly not someone who had been guiding Chat Noir, the sheltered and vaguely awkward kitten that he was, through a wide assortment of vague familial and social circumstances that he couldn't even begin to wrap his head around, with such verbal dexterity that she might've become some sort of life guru in Chat Noir's impossibly green, impossibly felinesque eyes.  
Certainly not one of the hero's only two real friends in the world while he was masked.  
Certainly not his classmate, who also didn't know who he really was.  
Certainly not a sleeping girl, who wasn't necessarily aware of his presence over half of the times he came by.

He mounted the banister with care, carefully climbing up to the apex of the building, before embarking.

Chat Noir soared over the Agreste manor, but where he should have fallen through an open window, Adrien fell in his place.  
With a distressed, "I'm _famished_ ," Plagg bulletted across the room for his cheese stash.  
It was a little early to start his morning routine - one where, the moment he came through his open window to the second he stepped out the front door, he prepared for the day ahead - leaving a rare amount of time to either take a nap or check _the Ladyblog_ and _Chat Track_ before school.

His bed was as unwelcoming and uncompelling as it had been the past two weeks. He caught his z's on a familiar balcony like a regular alley cat, the warmth of which would be lost over the hours, but felt more comfortable than his own mattress.  
His computer made its case easily.

"Better get more cheese, and quick." Plagg interrupted Adrien's advance on his computer chair while gravitating to the space in front of Adrien's nose with a piece of his prize in-paw.  
Immediately, Adrien jolted back and pinched his nose. "Why, you have some _right there_."  
"Working all night like that gives me a big appetite, so I'm about to run out!"  
Adrien's eyes flicked to the ceiling and back, his jaw set and exasperation radiating from him.  
Plagg floated off to the sofa, bringing his feast with him. "You'd be hungry too, if you had to be awake for hours, unwillingly fasting all the while. Just 'cause it wasn't as long today doesn't mean I'm not _starving_."

Adrien resigned from the battle and turned for his bedroom door, rubbing fingers over his face.  
"Okay, fine. Breakfast an hour early, that's not weird at all."  
His hands travelled up into his hair, amounting with knots and a little bit more potting soil.  
He paused and presented his dirty palm to Plagg.  
"Looks like that decides it." His kwami huffed. "Oh, quit. You'll still get your cheese. It's not like I'd be able to get to the kitchen if I looked like I spent all night rolling in the dirt. Just go lay down or something, I'll make it quick."

* * *

Plagg settled in while Adrien went to clean the soil from his hair, and stayed behind while Adrien headed down for breakfast.  
The kwami had been all but forbidden from travelling around the house, lest he be discovered because of his impossibly big mouth and eagerness to talk.  
It was the kind of trait that, when they were the only two around, Adrien grew tired of quickly. No matter how much he liked Plagg and the opportunity to be Chat Noir, the freedom, the sudden companion even during the more mundane hours of his life, Plagg was nothing short of a goddamn headache sometimes.  
It was the kind of trait that Adrien immediately felt inclined to forgive when Plagg _wasn't_ around to talk his ear off about cheese and cat habits and embarrassing jokes about the girls in his life, _wasn't_ making it easier to forget that the microcosm of the Agreste house was devoid of sound and company, _wasn't_ making him less conscientious of the way silverware against plateware sounded, or how every other noise reminded him of just how quiet and solitary every morning was.  
Even with Nathalie standing by at the side of the room while he ate, it was lonely. She didn't join him to eat, and she didn't engage him in conversation unless he prompted her. Whether it was because she didn't want to sit and talk with him, or because his father told her not to, he didn't know. He wondered during the quiet if he had ever asked, and what her answer had been, but never posed the question again.  
When he was finished, he excused himself from the table, and Nathalie excused herself from the room altogether.

One kitchen raid later, and he was back in his room, and Plagg was on him, ready for whatever cheese he'd acquired.

"Whaaaat? That's it?"  
"It's all the cheese that was in the kitchen. Just try and lay off it for a few hours, there will be more later."  
Adrien shoved a little in his bag for Plagg to consume over the course of the day, and the rest into Plagg's stash.  
The restock didn't even account for half of what the kwami had eaten while he was away.  
"Geez, you glutton," he called. "How does your body manage to fit that much cheese?"  
"I have an active metabolism," Plagg answered, "Especially since someone has to be Chat Noir all night. I'm making up for lost calories here!"

Adrien groaned and headed for his computer, finally.  
"You know, you'd have more time for the Ladyblog and Chat Track if you stopped sleeping with your head in flowerpots. Maybe, I dunno, a warm, cozy bed, where you don't have to be transformed... It sounds like heaven," Plagg sounded increasingly tired and euphoric by the second.  
"Maybe you should take a nap," the human retorted, "Since we don't agree on what heaven's like, you're going to have another late night."  
"Ughhhhh... No... Don't remind me..."  
His chin fell into one hand, propped up on his desk, and a smile crossed his face.

_The Ladyblog_ , penned by Alya Césaire, had only updated once over the past couple of days. While Alya worked hard to keep content fresh and regular, featuring sightings of their heroes and livestreams of battles, tales of those caught in the crosshairs of _la Papillon_ 's akumas, speculation on the Miraculous and the identities of those who held them, and even lore relating to their motifs, the latest post was enormous and full of citations and sources, and more than justified a day or two of leave.

He decided he'd save reading it for his time in the car, expecting he'd be cut short if he started now, and turned to Chat Track.

The website was used by the entire population of Paris to share in the love of their heroes, and was largely Chat Noir-centric. While Ladybug pictures weren't forbidden, the rules about posting pictures were rigid enough that they may as well have been.  
By Ladybug's own request, sightings couldn't be announced when the heroes were mid-patrol, as it would compromise the value of their surveillance. By Ladybug's suggestion, posts of the heroes in battle were also strictly filtered out, to keep civilians from wandering into hazardous environments just to take a picture.  
Because Ladybug was so scarce when she wasn't performing some duty to the city, she almost didn't exist in the records of the userbase. For the most part, she was referred to as a cryptid and an urban legend, and memes brought into question any actual picture with her in it.  
But every 200 posts or so, sandwiched between submissions of Chat Noir participating in a vine, being kissed on the cheeks by couples and singles, boys and girls alike, participating in a sport for all of five minutes, wandering the streets of Paris, or even accepting food from anyone who walked up to offer, there was a rare gem of Ladybug that Adrien would mine for hours to see - captions would reference "an unnamed girl in a jumpsuit" at the end of a street, swinging her yo-yo, conversing softly with a small child, or helping someone carry bags.

It felt like an eternity of searching before he found one:  
Ladybug was walking an elderly Chinese man across a street. A man who had such severe difficulty taking care of himself, the police had received innumerous reports about his dangerous close calls and almost theatric struggles once, only the year before. A man who had made television because of the regularity of his excursions ending up with him in a precarious location or some other predicament.  
A man who Adrien recognized from multiple other pictures where Ladybug took extra care to ensure he reached his destination safely.  
While the man had mellowed, Ladybug and the police seemed acutely aware of him and the demands of his disability. He never seemed to retain any memory of any of these incidents, and only seemed completely functional in the privacy of his home.

It wasn't the first time Adrien sighed, totally enamored by a mere picture of Ladybug, and it certainly wouldn't be the last.  
He didn't manage to find any more before a knock interrupted his reverie.

"Adrien, the car is waiting out front."

"On my way!"  
He saved the picture, turned off his monitor, and beckoned Plagg into his bookbag.

The kwami behaved amicably throughout the drive, likely already unconscious and satisfied with his full stomach. Adrien immersed himself in his phone, forgetting about the world around him as he poured through Alya's article on Ladybug's legacy.

_Before we begin, I'd like to first thank everyone for supporting and visiting _the Ladyblog_ , making this blog the number one resource on all things Ladybug & Chat Noir, and from Nadja Chamack for inviting me to join her on _Side by Side_ over the past few weeks. These things combined have given _the Ladyblog_ enough publicity to attract contributions from across the world in the compilation of this article._

_As many of you know, late last September, _le Papillon_ akumatized a local historian, M. Kubdel, coercing him into committing various crimes and atrocities as _le Pharaon_. During my time livestreaming as his hostage and potential sacrifice, the patrons of _the Ladyblog_ and I all learned of Ladybug's existence across the globe, fighting and thwarting world-rending events, tracing back all the way to ancient Egypt. As it would turn out, and as many people have speculated, her legacy extends even further - almost always in the immediate company of the Black Cat, or as we know him, Chat Noir._

_For those of you just tuning in, or who haven't done their homework and backlogged, excerpts of the event and interviews from M. Kubdel and Ladybug herself, are littered throughout the article along with the contributions of other world-renown historians._

Below was a picture of papyrus with a zoomed-in out-take. Among the hieroglyphs was one of a woman in a spotted dress, who appeared to be swinging a yo-yo. Beneath that, it referenced the source material and location.

"Nathalie?"  
She didn't make any noises of acknowledgement, and it occurred to Adrien that he didn't know whether or not she was even in the car.  
He looked up, and was immediately met with Nathalie's eyes, tired and lifeless and unwavering as always, barely over the tablet in her hands.  
"Uh, I was wondering. If there's any time open on my schedule soon, could I go to the Louvre? There's an exhibit there I was hoping to see."  
Her eyes returned to her tablet, and she fiddled with it for a moment before lifting her gaze to him again.  
"There isn't any time soon save for during school hours. Would you rather go there now over going to school? It would work well enough, given that you'll have a photoshoot mid-day and need to be pulled from classes regardless."  
"Oh." Right. A photoshoot, which he probably should have remembered - it'd cut into his classtime enough, he wasn't about to trade that for solitude at the Louvre. "Uh, no, that's okay. If there is a time that comes up, would you let me know?"  
The silence afterwards seemed like affirmation, but he continued watching her, hoping she'd discover a small window of time.

By the time they reached the school, she still hadn't proposed another time.

* * *

The car pulled up to the front of Collège Françoise Dupont, depositing him onto the sidewalk. As usual, Adrien had arrived a good ten minutes early.  
Once upon a time, it was out of sheer excess eagerness and anticipation.  
Now, it was more or less out of habit - something he sort of relished in conceptually, but wasn't always a huge joy to experience.  
He had ended up in a sort of limited space, socially. He wasn't a part of the usual clusters that would develop in the hallways - if he wasn't greeted with a clinging, loving embrace from Chloé or a fist-bump from Nino, he could ordinarily head straight for the classroom.

As it usually was on days when he had time to spare before class started, he was the first in the empty room, by a vacant seat.  
He'd remind himself that he wasn't alone or unliked, however, when more students poured into the classroom with every wave of warning bells, one by one, two by two, or in little gaggles that would continue sticking to one another like they were physically adhered to each other until the tardy bell sent them to their seats in anticipation of a teacher. Each one waved to him and he waved back, or high-fived him, or shared a greeting if they didn't absorb him into an ongoing conversation.  
Once upon a time, they'd even come in giving him props for the fact that Chloé had begun reigning in her condescension, the very reason he was once on limited terms with any of them. These days, even when Chloé came barging into an ongoing conversation that involved Adrien in some way, she would somehow become amicably involved.

This fact even extended to the girl who probably hated him most when he arrived at school, and spent the longest time still getting visibly frustrated with him enough to fume at the ears, turning red and averting her gaze while she spat out awkward conversation.  
While in all honesty, Adrien never thought the gum incident warranted _that much_ anger, he got to know her quickly: she had a really good, secret reason he could never dispute.  
At long last, though, they even occasionally stepped from acquaintanceship into friend territory, no matter how nervous she became at the concept of befriending him when she realized.  
Marinette.  
The girl who won the UMS III tournament and had given him a lucky charm she'd almost forgotten about entirely, on a whim.  
The girl who began talking with him a lot more easily over the past months, but nowhere near as easily as she addressed Chat Noir when they both needed it, or every time the vigilante spoke to her after.  
The girl whose balcony he woke up on this morning, and a couple handful more mornings before that, the girl whose morning itinerary he admittedly didn't think twice about, and the girl who had still somehow slipped into the back of his mind, utterly forgotten despite becoming a beacon of refuge to him, until he turned around to face Alya.

"Hey, Alya, any idea where Nino is?" His eyes slipped over to Marinette's desk, and he raised one brow. "Or Marinette?"  
Alya's face shifted into something sly and unreadable. "No idea about Marinette," Alya disclaimed, and her eyes wandered over to Nino's desk as she started on his name. "Nino, though... I figured he would've told you, but he came down with something _awful_. Won't say a whole lot, like what his symptoms are, but he says he's too gross for visitors." Her expression changed again, gradually souring, as she settled back and crossed her arms. It made Adrien feel like Nino was there, regardless, eliciting that look actively from his girlfriend. "But he's acting like he wants attention, so I guess I know what _I'm_ stuck doing after school."  
Adrien returned a sheepish, apologetic look. "I was going to ask Nino to borrow his notes since I have a photo-shoot mid-day, and I guess yours are taken, too."  
She shot a glance across her desk, then back to him, giving an unfortunate frown. "Sorry, Adrien. Maybe I can forward them to you later this afternoon?"  
"Yeah, that'd be cool. Thanks."

Mme. Bustier stayed mostly quiet, occasionally disclaiming that she was merely looking for something, and encouraged everyone to talk amongst themselves.  
Adrien leaned across his desk, a little at a loss.  
With Nino gone, he didn't have someone to actively talk to, and with Marinette gone, Alya stayed stalwartly involved with her phone, meaning his other option was talking across the aisle with Chloé, which would leave Sabrina out, and.  
As much as he didn't mind the noise around him not involving him, he longed for something.  
Maybe he could've spent today at the Louvre.

He emerged from his mild despair when the door was quietly opened by a very frazzled Marinette, drawing the attention of all of the students in the room.

In the back of the class, Adrien could sense the murmurs forming bets about whether or not, or _when_ Marinette would blow her own cover as she huddled to the ground and carefully closed the classroom door again. These days, she was doing it less often, making it anyone's game.

She stealthily crawled to her seat, up the stairs at the side of the class, even across the lap of Alya, who immediately started snickering, subduing her laugh behind two hands to avoid exposing her best friend.

Marinette managed to reach her seat quietly enough Mme. Bustier didn't suspect a thing, even when she'd turned around to the class.

"What happened _this time_?" Alya's voice was teasing and low.  
"I, uh," Marinette's voice was feeble and small. "Slept in?"  
" _No, really_?"

Adrien vaguely recalled her mayhem that morning. She'd probably realized her error after reaching the bakery below her home and retired back to bed after he had departed.  
He glanced up to the clock, and smiled.  
This must've been what Marinette was envisioning she'd have to do one-hundred thirty-three minutes ago.


End file.
